Living On After Failure: Affective Structures of Modern Life

By: Irving Goh

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Synopsis: In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Édouard Levé, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and postscripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure, or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces in which to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9781478032243
Related ISBNs:: 9781478028994
Publisher:: Duke University Press
Date of Addition:: 09/12/25
Copyrighted By:: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Philosophy
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.